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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26058349">It Is His</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirbyfanclub/pseuds/kirbyfanclub'>kirbyfanclub</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Welcome to Night Vale</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Cecil is Described, Episode 100 (Welcome to Night Vale), Gen, Implied/Referenced Antisemitism, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Kind of..., M/M, Marriage, Moving On, Night Vale Typical Horror, Permanent Injury, Unrequited Love, Yearning, description of earl being burned &amp; also dragged away by the mute children, i miss wtnv... i havent listened in a long time, i wrote this... maybe two years ago. but i never posted it. its nice though, in like one line</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 11:02:12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,076</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26058349</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirbyfanclub/pseuds/kirbyfanclub</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Glimpses into the turbulent life of Earl Harlan, through love, pain, confusion, some more pain, and even more love.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Carlos &amp; Earl Harlan, Carlos/Cecil Palmer, Earl Harlan &amp; Cecil Palmer, Earl Harlan &amp; Roger Harlan, Earl Harlan/Cecil Palmer</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>It Is His</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Earl Harlan is a quiet boy. He is small and scrawny and his pale skin burns in the white heat of Night Vale summers. His feet go out when he walks and he can’t seem to find his balance, no matter how often his mother puts meat on his head and tells him to keep it in place. He likes the smell of dirt and thinks anatomy is fascinating. He helps his father clean the animals he hunts, and when he’s older he helps him catch them. He takes their prey and cooks alongside his mother, adoring how the dirt and the blood and the spice sizzle in the pan and blend together in the heavy air. Earl Harlan appreciates the little things in his little world and he wonders quietly, as he does most things, about how life would be different if he spoke up a bit more.</p><p>He goes to school. People don’t pay attention to him, and he’s okay with that. After all, he is a quiet boy. He is an averagely achieving student. He does enough to get by, but he likes learning more than he likes achieving, so it’s okay. His mother and father ask him to do more. He doesn’t, but he helps around the house more than any boy his age usually would, and that seems to keep them satisfied.</p><p>Earl is three months fifteen when he sees a new face, one that makes him wish he’d made more of a name for himself. The new boy plops a worn bag next to Earl’s desk and relaxes into his chair, bright shirt clashing with his torn jeans. Earl watches him carefully, observing how his slightly bent, definitely too big, glasses slide down his long freckle ridden nose. He shifts his gaze from that nose to his cheeks, his forehead, his neck, and he begins to sweat because he has so many freckles. He’s beautiful. The boy, seeming to sense Earl’s sudden distress, meets his gaze, and Earl drops his mouth lopsidedly into a face only possible on an awkward teenage boy with a crush as he sees that the boy’s eyes are violet. Violet.</p><p>Earl chokes on nothing. He forces a cough, a pathetic attempt at recovery, and pretends to have just now acknowledged the boy instead of having stared at him for the last few minutes.</p><p>Earl stutters out his name. Full name. He tells the boy that he sits here, as if that wasn’t obvious. He laughs, like his name and his seat is a joke. It isn’t. He’s just hypothetically and maybe literally dying inside. The boy laughs too, responding with his own introduction. His name is Cecil. Cecil offers Earl his hand (covered in freckles and Jesus Christ this boy is pretty). Earl takes it, and Earl feels like his entire life has led to this moment: when he shakes Cecil’s hand.</p><p>Earl is shocked to find out that Cecil is a quiet boy too. Or, quiet isn’t the right word. Cecil is loud and laughs loud and full, voice cracking proudly. He’s outgoing and weirdly charismatic for a fifteen-year-old boy, but he’s rarely like that around people who aren’t Earl. Earl wonders if he just thrives off being around someone meeker than he is. Like there can only be one quiet boy at a time, and Earl is already taking that space in their relationship.</p><p>People don’t see Cecil the same way Earl sees him. They think that his personality is a odd, that he dresses a bit too brightly. People whisper scathing things about his mother and sister and the Palmers’ culture behind his back. It makes Earl’s blood boil. Cecil doesn’t let it bother him, somehow. He’s a beacon of positivity in Earl’s life, he makes him want to sing, want to yell, want to grab his hand and run off into the woods with him, away from people who say mean things and judge unfairly. He is intoxicated, infatuated by Cecil’s existence. By his galaxy of freckles and violet eyes and warm brown skin. He wants nothing more than to exist around him for the rest of his life.</p><p>Cecil mentions one day about wanting to join the Scouts. Earl doesn’t think twice about signing up with him, despite his mother and father’s warnings about falling behind in school. They start on the same day, and they stick together every second of it. Cecil thrives, and as he nudges Earl out of his shell, so does Earl. They rise up the ranks hand in hand, metaphorically, and eventually, literally. 

They kiss under the stars, and Cecil murmurs sweet nothings into his red hair and Earl has never been happier. They stay up late and talk about their favorite movies, wondering when the technology for film with sound will come. They listen to Leonard Burton’s radio show and Cecil says that city hall prophesied that he’d take his place one day. Earl asks if he actually wants to, and Cecil says he doesn’t know, but it seems like it’d be fun. The more they listen the more Cecil gets into it, and soon he is making goofy voices and reporting on the new bugs they found in a way that makes Earl cry laughing. Long after the other camper’s lanterns go out, Earl is left reeling under Cecil’s hands in their small tent in the woods, and he swears he’s in love.</p><p>People still whisper about Cecil, and now they whisper about Earl too, but when he looks into Cecil’s eyes he realizes he couldn’t care less.</p><p>The pins on Earl’s shirt grow in number in tandem with Cecil’s as they go forward, two of the oldest scouts in the troop. Once kids hit sixteen, most drop out in favor of other hobbies as they develop, but for Earl, it was never really about the troop. He only experiences doubt once, when he is rushed to the hospital from obtaining his “Fire Isn’t Real! We Are Impervious to Hell’s Flames!” badge. Earl had been cooking his whole life, so maybe it was cockiness that ignored Cecil’s caution about his interpretation of the instructions. Whatever the origin of his thought process, Earl had stumbled, fallen, and hit the searing earth with a resounding thud and resulting scream, dampened only by Cecil crying for the counselors to help. 

Earl didn’t remember what had happened between the fall and his awakening in the hospital with burning pain and a large cloth bandage on his right cheek, but he was thankful to have been able to open his eyes and see Cecil passed out in a chair beside him, hand grasping his with a fearful stiffness. He got the badge out of pity, and as a final hoorah as it was removed from the roster after Cecil and the Harlans’ thoroughly badgered the scout leaders with complaints and anger.</p><p>Earl gets out of the hospital within a few days, eager to leave and return to his blissful day-to-day, even with a scar blossoming across his face. Cecil hugs him gingerly, careful not to brush against his right cheek. 

They fall back into place. They make scrapbooks of their journeys, and they leave school early to climb trees and watch the radio station’s blinking lights through obsolete telescopes Cecil found cheap at a thrift store. Josie Ortiz walks by with her wife on their way to the opera. She gives them tips on where to look for ghosts to complete theirs “After Death” badge and where the teleporting lemonade stand will be next. Regulars pass them by and they stay in the trees, eating fruit and flipping coins and talking about what they’ll do when they’re old. Cecil is dedicated to replacing Leonard Burton now, and Earl doesn’t know what he wants, but he wants to follow Cecil wherever he goes.</p><p>And then everything they’ve built crumbles in one panicked night. Abby is rushed to the hospital after getting very sick, and the next thing Earl knows Cecil drops out of the Scouts and then school and Abby has a baby girl with a spine disease and Ms. Palmer is gone and the whispers are no longer whispers but bored “I-told-you-so’s” thrown unasked for into dry conversations, and Earl is left alone with the bandage on his face, his unfinished scrapbooks, and his lantern on lonely late nights in the woods.</p><p>He sees Cecil on the street a few months (months) later and he seems distracted. He gives Earl a quick hug and mumbles something about his new gig at the radio station and how he needs to get this story ‘or else I won’t stand out among the other interns, you understand Earl, this is my dream!’ and Earl’s heart breaks because this Cecil is not his Cecil.</p><p>So Earl forgets about him, the best he can. Maybe it’s selfish, but Earl is seventeen angry and graduating, and he doesn’t have time.</p><p>––––––––</p><p>Earl is nineteen and a Scout Leader. He kept with the Scouts even after Cecil left. The wilderness was comfortable and insanely empty. His parents were disappointed that he wasn’t valedictorian, although he never was going to be in the first place and they knew that. The spark that Cecil had ignited had faded somewhere between there and here, and Early didn’t really know what kept him in the Scouts. He supposed he felt enough at peace, or somewhere close, within the trees that stood as awkward and quiet as he was. He likes his job well enough, and his heart goes out to the kids who follow him, trying to find their own footing in a lonely world. 

He’s proud and he’s terrified, and when he receives a letter from Cecil’s radio station, asking him how he feels, that is what he writes back. And then he pauses, and he adds something else. The chances of him surviving an Eternal Scouts ceremony are unknown, but he assumes they aren’t good. So he takes a leap and tries to remind Cecil of who he was and how they were. Before he gives himself the chance to feel pathetic and decide to rescind his plea, he shoves the letter into the hand of the empty-eyed child messenger. He goes to the ceremony, and he is proud of his scouts. Then, he is only, only terrified, as a mute child he doesn’t know grabs his leg and pulls him aggressively into the ceremony tent. He screams and screams, but there isn’t any passion there. Earl is nineteen, and he is alone, and he is confused, and he is ready to die a quiet death.</p><p>––––––––</p><p>Earl is no longer nineteen, and there are no hands gripping his leg. He is alive, and he is in Night Vale again, and he has a son. Earl is 35, and he is alive and he has a son who looks like a corpse and who walks blindly at nighttime and who Earl does not know the name of or how he has him. The kid, this nameless kid who has his rotting face, is the product of a relationship Earl can’t conceive or remember. Earl watches his son he’s never met before, but is his, move around a house he’s never seen before but is his, and he runs his hands up and down his face. Across the burn on his cheek, long since healed, faded and browned over time Earl didn’t experience pass. This face is not the face he remembers, and yet, like his son and like his house, is his. He doesn’t know what to do.</p><p>At 8 P.M. he remains sat down on the couch, his son having retired to his room, and the radio turns on of its own volition. He hears a deep voice call out to him in the darkness, and his hands drop in disbelief. Cecil. He falls back onto the couch, laughing and sobbing and not knowing what his life has become. Is this his life? Earl doesn’t know anything.</p><p>––––––––</p><p>He takes a job at a nearby restaurant, Tourniquet, and his past prowess in cooking quickly elevates his position to sous-chef. He likes his job, more so than he liked the Scouts. It’s methodical, calming, easy to follow a recipe and forget everything around him while he watches water boil. His life isn’t normal, and it won’t be, and Earl starts to get used to that. It’s been a month, and he still doesn’t know his son’s name. He doesn’t know his son’s mother or father, if he has either. He watches the child, observing his painstakingly similar features and tries to find something else, someone else he might resemble. When he finds nothing, Earl decides it doesn’t matter. The next day, he gives his son a cautious hug before sending him off to school, and he wishes he knew his name.</p><p>He is washing his hands in the employee bathroom when he gets a phone call. Earl rarely gets phone calls, his family isn’t here anymore, and his son doesn’t seem to get sick. He slaps his drying hand on his pant leg once, twice, before he reaches for the phone, and tentatively answers. And who does he hear on the other end? Who else, but Cecil fucking Palmer. Earl hears Cecil’s laughing breath and he feels like a teenager again, knees weak underneath the spell of a funny bespeckled boy with warm skin and cool eyes. He asks for an interview, and Earl makes his way through an acceptance, overjoyed and angry that this will be the first time he’s seen his friend, his first friend, his only friend, his best friend, in years. </p><p>Years was an understatement. Last time he’d really seen Cecil he had been a teenager. Now, they were in their late thirties. Decades. The first time he’s seen his first-only-best friend in decades. How could he refuse?</p><p>So he went. “Cooking Stuff with Earl Harlan” was a good segment, informative, interesting. Their comradery inspired connection between the host and his listeners. They talked, first on air, and then off. Cecil invited him out to lunch with him and his new boyfriend. Carlos seemed like a wonderful man, as handsome as he was kind. He seemed to be treating Cecil well, which he deserved. Earl was still angry, and now he was a bit broken-hearted, but he was relieved to see Cecil in a good place. They talked, and Cecil avoided questions, but they were talking, and things got better. He had his best friend back. He found the courage to ask his son’s name. Roger. It got better.</p><p>Earl learns that Roger likes English class, and that he’s good friends with Cecil’s niece Janice, and that he really loves birds, especially owls. He learns that his birthday is in September, and Earl gets him a knitted wool cap with the grinning face of an owl on it. Roger loves it. He wears it every day after that, despite the sweltering heat of the desert. Earl takes the day off work, and they go get ice cream. Earl tries to loosen up, be a goofy dad for his young son, and he manages to get quite a few laughs out of him. 

They bond. Things are better. 

Earl smiles more. He and Roger spend Thanksgiving at Cecil and Carlos’s apartment. Janice is there, and so is Abby and her husband Steve. Earl finds Steve a delightful, if not very corny, man, much to Cecil’s chagrin. ‘You’re supposed to be on my side, Earl!’ he whines, mock anger in his voice. Abby looks much older than he remembers her being, though he supposed that is to be expected. Last time he spoke with her she was a panicked, single mother barely of eighteen years, abandoned by her dickhead of a highschool sweetheart, and the suddenly forced matriarch of her family. He was proud of her. He was proud of Cecil, for working hard and building himself a life out of broken pieces.</p><p>He’s crushed that he wasn’t here to help him do so.</p><p>Apple cider in hand, he and Cecil watch Roger and Janice play outside. Roger pushes Janice’s wheelchair as they pretend to be pirates, Janice as the captain. She’s a spirited girl, with lots of thoughts in her head and a lot of bravery in her tiny body. He takes a sip of his drink, and tells Cecil he’s so glad that Roger has a good friend like her. Cecil smiles back at him, softly, and says that he is too. They watch in silence before Carlos calls Cecil over to discuss something Steve had proposed to him, and Earl follows, laughing quietly as Cecil groans. Things are good. </p><p>––––––––</p><p>He stays in touch with Cecil and Carlos. He’s at both of their bachelor parties, which are less a celebration of bachelorhood as they are two separate days dedicated to the men gushing about each other.</p><p> </p><p>When Cecil asks Earl to be his best man he accepts, of course. They’re best friends. He caters, and he is the best man. He makes sure that the food he cooks for them is the best food he’s ever cooked. He spends hours on the cake, working with the Angels to create a picture-perfect topper of the happy couple. He gives a toast. His date forgets who he is, but he doesn’t really mind. This isn’t about him, or her. </p><p>To his surprise, his heart doesn’t ache as he expected it to when he watches Cecil and Carlos kiss, officially marking their new status as husbands. It still aches, but it doesn’t ache for Cecil, the man Earl so desperately felt he was destined to be with. Instead, it aches for what Cecil has. Love. A relationship where both parties are so deeply invested in each other they are willing to live out every day of their lives in a nonsensical, dangerous place like Night Vale just to be together. He aches for someone to hold him like Cecil and Carlos hold each other. He wonders, quietly, if Cecil and he would have ever been like this if things had been different. Somehow, as much as he loved Cecil then, and loves Cecil now, he doubts it.</p><p>It’s not a sad doubt. It’s one that opens a door and gives Earl hope. He has so much else out there that will make things good. Things are already good.</p>
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